svat

96 ms·

631.
by svat 5y ago
Original link (and maybe the submission URL should be changed to this, per HN policy): https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-space-cleaner-spotted-grabbing...
632.
by svat 5y ago
Either that, or I think the idea is that uₓ is a polynomial of degree at most 6. (Such a polynomial is what the difference engine computes, and it may be a good approximation for the actually desired function.)
633.
by svat 5y ago
I'm not an expert (my only qualification is that I read a part of Babbage's book; others must know a lot more), but see http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BBabbage... and (linked from it) https:&
634.
by svat 5y ago
His "investors" being in this case the government, and Babbage does not seem to have understood politicians or the constraints that a government operates under. You can see the timeline in https://www.gutenberg.org&#x2F
635.
by svat 5y ago
Good blog post and thanks for writing it. But though Babbage's work may not have been lost for quite as close as 100 years, there is truth to the usual history and I don't think these two examples establish the "turns out to
636.
by svat 5y ago
While this is a good point (yes, many of Babbage's difficulties were self-inflicted; arithmetic on 40-digit numbers wasn't needed in mechanical hardware and could be done in software as the industry started to realize in the 1970s
637.
by svat 5y ago
The tool `eqn`, which she wrote (joined by Brian Kernighan) is an "ancestor" of TeX: The mathematical syntax of TeX (design started 1977) was based on eqn (1975). For example, the eqn paper ( https://research.swtch.com&#
638.
by svat 5y ago
In the meantime, I wrote this up in (too much elementary) detail: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/10t4WRhyAPK1pCzBkaau... The funny thing is, it's often the case that already √(m^2 - 4N) > N^(1/4),
639.
by svat 5y ago
I was skeptical at first, but this checks out: I think I was able prove that if N is a product of two numbers `a` and `b` (both odd or both even, for simplicity), such that a is less than b and (b-a) is less than 2√2 times N^(1/4), and
640.
by svat 5y ago
Sometime last year, I started doing these 24 exercises in TeX/LaTeX -- when I started, my idea was to show how TeX's very simple box-glue-penalty model (its "glue" is like springs with specified stretch and shrink) is ye
641.
by svat 5y ago
Tangent: I was wrong about E. T. Bell's quote about Gauss: the page (229–230) discusses both: https://archive.org/details/menofmathematics0000bell/page/22... The quote about the fox does not seem to be i
642.
by svat 5y ago
Everyone's experience is different, so it is unsurprising that are parts of this article that resonate very strongly and other parts not at all — overall, very valuable to have read this. The philosopher John Perry has a humorous essay
643.
by svat 5y ago
(I started posting the below as a top-level comment, but in the end it arrived at the same point as yours, so leaving it as a reply…) In Indian/Sanskrit literary theory (poetics), in the discussion of figures of speech (rhetoric, etc
644.
by svat 5y ago
Despite the title (a title with a question in it invites people to comment without reading the post, even more than the usual already high level), this is a really good post IMO, with valuable insights into not just mathematics but also the
645.
by svat 5y ago
Note that Knuth has written dozens of books and is perpetually making edits and corrections to them (not just typos, but often extensive rewrites while making sure that the book remains coherent as a whole): this is an activity that comes e
646.
by svat 5y ago
The program is the proof. It's rigorous in the sense that it's an exhaustive tree search (with lower and upper bounds used for pruning), without any heuristics like "pick a word that leaves the smallest set remaining in the w
647.
by svat 5y ago
Here's a variant question about Wordle strategy that's AFAIK unsolved, which I'm currently working on (my program is too slow). Namely: yes, any optimal strategy will involve adapting your second guess to the response to the
648.
by svat 5y ago
Right, that point of view makes sense if you imagine two players separately playing Wordle and comparing their results, and indeed that's what the OP may have been thinking. But as far as I know, Wordle is primarily a game for one play
649.
by svat 5y ago
IMO, never losing the game is the bare minimum for any reasonable cost function: never take > 6 guesses. Beyond that, you can have different optimization functions based on whether you're trying to minimize the worst-case depth of t
650.
by svat 5y ago
There has been much discussion about how this post is highly misleading. See • Hillel Wayne, "Donald Knuth Was Framed": https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/donald-knuth-wa... • me, various comme
651.
by svat 5y ago
The original published version (and McIlroy's review) is in the second of these two columns (including the earlier one for context): • Bentley, J., & Knuth, D. (1986). Programming pearls: Literate Programming. Communications of the
652.
by svat 5y ago
The testcases notwithstanding, I found a bug in my code as well. Fixed my `response` function to: def response(h, g): assert len(h) == len(g) L = len(h) correct = [i for i in range(L) if h[i] == g[i]] p
653.
by svat 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your code. I had seen other people also mention that these 5 guesses (AESIR, ARISE, RAISE, REAIS, SERAI) all narrow down the list to 168 (in the worst case), but I was curious why the code I wrote to play with this was gi
654.
by svat 5y ago
Thanks for sharing these wonderful details! And with the last bit, you probably did the world a service, guarding his time by not telling him. :-)
655.
by svat 5y ago
This comment would make sense if Knuth used literate programming primarily for academic papers. But in fact he created WEB for writing TeX and METAFONT, both of which (while their source code was published as a book later) were production s
656.
by svat 5y ago
Incidentally, while this is a great post, the order of yak-shaving is actually pretty close to the opposite described in the post. He started with wanting a digital version of Monotype Modern 8A (what became Computer Modern). His first
657.
by svat 5y ago
Actually, Knuth first wrote TeX in SAIL (1977–1978), then discovered everyone was interested and rewriting it for their own systems in divergent ways, so he rewrote a "portable" version in WEB (Pascal) (1980–1982), and he did inde
658.
by svat 5y ago
I've read a fair number of Knuth's literate programs, and I've read this post a few times over the years, and my opinion is mixed. The first point in the post is that many (non-Knuth) LP systems provide typesetting, but allow
659.
by svat 5y ago
(TLDR: Compare [2] and [4].) These are examples of files that have gone the route DVI → PS → PDF, where the PS file contained Type 3 (bitmap) fonts without hinting instructions for on-screen viewing. If you have the original PS file you can
660.
by svat 5y ago
> Furthermore, the effort to rewrite as much of the TeX implementation as possible in Lua is perplexing. Very little of the TeX implementation has been rewritten in Lua. (Assuming you're talking of LuaTeX itself and not the "

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